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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

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Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#151

Post by simonh »

mjevans wrote: post #24
city41 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

The problem with that is it breaks the value signalling we get from paying for things. With commercial software, it only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it, proving that it has value to them. How do we know this as against that open source project is worth funding? How do we tell how many users it has, and what value it provides to them?

Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#152

Post by konjin »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #119
roenxi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google. Mozilla. The FSF. Microsoft. IBM springs to mind. These will all have their time in the spotlight as tech darlings or villains. You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do. It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push the…

You seem to imply that there are always incentives pushing any organization to do evil things. That's a big presumption. Organizations are just groups of people. People have varied motivations, and their motivations don't have to change just because they join forces with others. If what you're saying is correct, then either people's own varied motivations are all evil, or instantly become evil the moment they join a…

People do, people who end up leading large groups of people don't.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#153

Post by konjin »

arvinsim wrote: post #144
konjin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't want to listen to Stallman because he talks about motivations. The number of times I've had people downvote me for pointing out all organizations will act to maximize profit regardless the cost to others is extraordinary. It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.

Curious as to why you left our Apple and Amazon.

Because I didn't want to write down every corp with more than 10 people in it.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#154

Post by konjin »

wolco2 wrote: post #59
konjin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. I remember when I said that Mozilla offering women's outreach was the start of the end for them and being called a misogynist for it. Their current market rate speaks for itself.

That's an interesting point. Regardless of the initiative (could have been rural broadband) by expanding into these areas Mozilla's parent company said.. We have enough money for operations. This extra money will go to this good cause. As someone who might donate I would hold off because they have more than enough. I could use my money directly to support a cause. Not sure how a charity starts giving to another chari…

People who lead groups want power. You can get more power when you lead more people, or you can get more money and turn that into power.

Which is why I'm a huge fan of sortition as a way to run groups of people larger than a dozen.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#155

Post by zhte415 »

core-questions wrote: post #84
the_af wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm applauding your post furiously. It warms my heart there are still people like you. Yet, it's disheartening that even in many online forums of so-called hackers, one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. Or who argue against the FSF and the right to tinker. If I had to choose one quote from your post is this one: > The general purpose computer is h…

> one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. What these people don't know is that we already had all of these arguments, 20+ years ago, on Usenet and Slashdot and a ton of mailing lists and it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll. The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago. The problem…

> it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll.

Is it? Logging into my old Slashdot account after several years of not bisiting /., early 6 digits, I found old posts removed.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#156

Post by Nextgrid »

themacguffinman wrote: post #83
grawprog wrote: post #53

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users actually care? Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & ce…

The free software “industry” and its enthusiasts should realise and accept that IT is a tool and not a lifestyle for many people. This includes me despite being a developer and somewhat of a tech enthusiast - a decade ago I had plenty of time to tinker around with a custom Linux installation, nowadays I just run macOS and call it a day.

Software that doesn’t infringe on your freedoms is great, but functionality and user experience is important. A big reason why proprietary and increasingly user-hostile software won is because it works well enough (despite the hostility) for the majority of people.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#157

Post by Guthur »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140
Guthur wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want. The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many. This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should und…

Education won't help with systemic problems. Even if individuals would be equally, ruthlessly greedy as corporation, you're still talking about uncoordinated individuals taking on a money making megamachine. Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.

In a market economy you are free to not use their product. No one is forcing you to use Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever.

The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high.

Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your best interest at heart than a corporation, there both made up people it would be moronic to think they'd act any differently.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#158

Post by SuoDuanDao »

samatman wrote: post #48
mjevans wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other optio…

Traditional Judaic society has a caste of people who do nothing but study sacred texts, and they've got a decent track record - I think it comes down to how much public admiration there is for the best open-source coders, if there's a lot it would attract a lot of talent.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#159

Post by SuoDuanDao »

Guthur wrote: post #157
TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education won't help with systemic problems. Even if individuals would be equally, ruthlessly greedy as corporation, you're still talking about uncoordinated individuals taking on a money making megamachine. Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.

In a market economy you are free to not use their product. No one is forcing you to use Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever. The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high. Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your bes…

Doesn't this assume these same political entities won't be manipulated into giving unfair advantages to educational approaches that benefit the manipulator?

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#160

Post by fsflover »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #63
grawprog wrote: post #53

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

> Chromebooks Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production. No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

> Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot.

No, they aren't: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

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